UC QuakeBox by the numbers
Another 77 UC QuakeBox stories have been added to UC QuakeStudies, bringing the total number available in the archive to 149. This is a significant milestone for both UC CEISMIC and the NZILBB and no mean feat; each story needs to be synched, clipped, transcribed, linguistically tagged and then re-encoded before it can be added to the archive.
These 149 stories were recorded in a variety of different locations, and come from people of many different ages, ethnicities and backgrounds. We thought we would do a bit of analysis to show you the current scope of the collection.
Story Locations
Over two years, the UC QuakeBox project gathered stories from nine different locations around the city. This pie chart represents the stories currently in our archive, a fairly even spread of locations. New Brighton, Eastgate Mall and the University of Canterbury comprise slightly larger chunks due to the fact that stories were gathered there for a longer period of time.
Age of Participants
Interestingly, the age of the participants seems to follow a bell curve. 46-55 was our biggest age group in this collection of stories, closely followed by 56-65 and 66-75. Both the 76-85 age group and the 26-35 told eight stories. Unfortunately, we were not able to record stories from people under 18 years old.
Gender of Participants
Currently there are 23 more female stories than male in the archive. Hopefully this will even out as we continue to add more stories to the archive.
Zoning of Participants' Houses
The majority of participants in the current collection indicated that their house was in the green zone. Nine participants had a red-zoned property and six were white zoned. One person had an orange-zoned property which meant engineers still needed to undertake investigation of their property.
One of the aims of the UC QuakeBox project was to gather a diverse set of stories that would describe a variety of perspectives and experiences in Canterbury during and after the earthquakes. These graphs indicate the diversity currently in the collection, and it is our hope that this diversity will become more apparent as we continue to add material to the archive.
UC QuakeBox has been supported by the Canterbury Community Trust, PBT Transport and Leighs Construction.